The feats of miniaturization are astounding. Given Imaging, Ltd. of Yoqneam, Israel, manufactures a miniature 11 mm×26 mm video camera that fits inside a pill that is swallowed by a patient. SanDisk Corporation of Milpitas, Calif., manufactures a 16 GB MicroSDHC card having physical dimensions 15 mm×11 mm×0.7 mm, which is the size of a fingernail. Western Digital Corporation of Lake Forest, Calif. now manufactures a 320 GB portable hard drive having physical dimensions 126 mm×79 mm×15 mm, which is the size of a passport, and weighs 180 g. Three of these passport drives together contain almost a terabyte of data, weigh slightly over half a kilogram, and can be held in the palm of one's hand.
Many difficult challenges are encountered when attempting to miniaturize devices, relating to electronic circuitry, power management, heat generation, mechanical structures, and more. Conventional electronic and mechanical components generally require specific amounts of space, and thus limit the ability to miniaturize. As such, miniaturization often involves developing new components and new designs. Reductions in size by as little as 1 mm are often breakthrough achievements in miniaturization.
As miniature electronic devices are often attached to larger devices, they require suitable connector plugs for connecting them to the larger devices. To make electrical connection, a connector plug is engaged with metal contact pins housed in a receptacle for the connector. Conventional receptacles have insert and eject mechanisms, for inserting a connector plug into a receptacle and for extracting the connector plug from the receptacle, respectively. However, the insert/eject mechanisms impose limitations on miniaturization, which is one of the challenges that must be overcome in order to reduce sizes of electronic devices.
One type of conventional receptacle, used for SD cards and memory sticks, uses as a “push-to-insert and push-to-eject” mechanism. An example of such a receptacle is the Pitch ExpressCard® Ejector, manufactured and distributed by Molex Incorporated of Lisle, Ill. For insertion, a user pushes the card/memory stick into a host device until it locks into its receptacle, and for extraction, the user again pushes the card/memory stick into the host device until the lock is released and the card/memory stick pops out. Such receptacles require that the card/memory stick has slack length to span movement of the card/memory stick beyond the locked position. Additionally, in order to enable sufficient force to fully extract the connector plugs from the contact pins of the receptacles, such receptacles generally have a flat pad structure to minimize the friction, resulting in the pad being exposed on the surface of the host device.
It would thus be of advantage to have connectors and receptacles that do not require conventional insert/eject mechanisms.